Systematic Establishment of Robustness and Standards in Patient-Derived Xenograft Experiments and Analysis.

Yvonne A Evrard
Anuj Srivastava
Jelena Randjelovic
Nci PDXNet Consortium
James H Doroshow
Dennis A Dean
Jeffrey S Morris
Jeffrey Chuang, The Jackson Laboratory

Abstract

Patient-Derived Xenografts (PDXs) are tumor-in-mouse models for cancer. PDX collections, such as the NCI PDXNet, are powerful resources for preclinical therapeutic testing. However, variations in experimental and analysis procedures have limited interpretability. To determine the robustness of PDX studies, the PDXNet tested temozolomide drug response for three pre-validated PDX models (sensitive, resistant, and intermediate) across four blinded PDX Development and Trial Centers (PDTCs) using independently selected SOPs. Each PDTC was able to correctly identify the sensitive, resistant, and intermediate models, and statistical evaluations were concordant across all groups. We also developed and benchmarked optimized PDX informatics pipelines, and these yielded robust assessments across xenograft biological replicates. These studies show that PDX drug responses and sequence results are reproducible across diverse experimental protocols. In addition, we share the range of experimental procedures that maintained robustness, as well as standardized cloud-based workflows for PDX exome-seq and RNA-Seq analysis and for evaluating growth.